Rusty Costanza/The Times-PicayuneGov. Bobby Jindal discusses the response to the oil spill last week, as Grand Isle Mayor David Camardelle, center, looks on. Jindal is better off staying close to home these days anyway.

Had he gone ahead and released "Real Hope, Real Change: New Conservative Solutions to Rescue America" in July, as planned, Jindal surely would have been slammed for tending to his personal ambitions while Louisiana remained in crisis.

Besides, the governor's angrily aggressive response to the catastrophe is already doing more to boost his image than any author interview could.

At home, Jindal's constant presence at the scene of the disaster has suggested vigilance and reconnected him to his constituents on an emotional level for perhaps the first time since Hurricane Gustav. His full-throated demand that the federal government allow the state to build a chain of sand berms to try to prevent oil from coming ashore has tapped directly into the public's deep frustration and desire for immediate action. As lagniappe, it's also given Jindal a little distance from the messy money battles unfolding in Baton Rouge.

Nationally, the spill has offered Jindal a rare second chance to make a good impression on the big stage, a year and half after his dreadful debut prompted many out-of-towners to write him off for good.

And make a good impression is what he seems to have done, according to press reports. One Beltway publication, "The New Republic," directly contrasted Jindal's before-and-after personas in a story headlined "Kenneth the Page Becomes a Man." Kenneth, of course, is the goofily overeager character from "30 Rock" to whom Jindal was compared after his response to President Barack Obama's first congressional address. Among other things, "The New Republic" lauded Jindal for casting aside the anti-government rhetoric of that speech to simply advocate for his state's great needs.

To those who have followed Jindal's career, none of this should come as a surprise. Crisis Manager Bobby has always been more appealing than Talking Point Bobby. Crisis Manager Bobby is actually the guy who won the gubernatorial election in 2007 pretty much by acclamation, with strong support from Democrats as well as Republicans. He did it by casting himself not as an ideologue, but as the guy you'd want in charge when things go wrong -- the guy, frankly, that many wished had been in charge when Hurricane Katrina struck two years earlier.

There's another side to Jindal we're seeing for the first time in a while: Political Mastermind Bobby.

On the fight over the berms, for example, Jindal has played an impressive hand. In insisting that the Army Corps of Engineers approve his request to build a chain of temporary islands, and calling the agency out for going through time-consuming reviews, he came across as far more action-oriented than the feds.

Jindal overstated things when he said "We know that it works." Nobody knows, and some experts have raised concerns over unintended side effects.

Yet he correctly realized that people are eager to give anything that might minimize damage a try. Even if the feds are right to be cautious, Jindal succeeded in putting them on the defensive and probably forced last week's approval of a portion of the plan.

Delaying the book accomplishes one more thing: It gives him new material, and a chance to recalibrate the tone. To the extent that Jindal had already intended to blast inflexible federal bureaucracy, one of his favorite themes, he's now got even more ammunition. And if he had planned to decry government regulation, as his previous rhetorical forays have suggested he would, he can take into account the shift in public mood after such a spectacular failure of oversight.

For Jindal, that's yet another opportunity to emerge from crisis.

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Stephanie Grace is a staff writer. She can be reached at sgrace@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3383.